The East End

by Jason Allen

  “Oh, it’s fine,” Pete said. “Just checking in with my wife.”

  Leo would have preferred to slide onto the leather seat in the back of the limo than engage in conversation, but felt obliged to make the gesture and fill the unnervingly calm space with noise.

  “Remind me, how long have you been married?”

  “Eight years,” Pete said.

  “And you have kids.”

  “Yep, a boy and a girl. He’s—”

  “That’s wonderful.”

  His driver grinned and Leo made a mental note not to steamroll him again.

  “And how old are they, Pete?”

  “He’s seven and she’s four.”

  “That’s excellent.”

  “Can’t believe my little girl will be in kindergarten next year. Time definitely flies.”

  Leo laid a hand on Pete’s shoulder and sifted through actuary tables of phrases in his overstimulated brain, straining for something to say. He wanted to ask Pete what he thought of him traveling from the city to the Hamptons with a man thirty years his junior—damn, closer to thirty-five years younger—but instead, Leo reached out to lean against the car and heard himself say through a mild slur, “Well, you know what they say. We’re all working for someone.”

  Pete’s silence compelled him to add, “You know, with kids—when you have kids, you’re really working for them.” Pete nodded while still wearing the obligatory company smile, and Leo cringed as words continued seeping from his mouth, slur-heavy and uncensored. “Kids, Pete, wives—they all want this or that, or it’s what families do, and then they’re all grown up and you realize you didn’t do something you wish you had, or you spent all that time with your head down, trying to provide. Then one day, one day—you just don’t know—”

  He stopped, embarrassed by the look on Pete’s face, detecting a hint of pity, a hint of judgment. Then, mercifully, they both turned their heads as the metal bathroom door squealed at the hinges, strained open and swung closed with a heavy clang. Henry made his way over, fidgeting with his belt, his eyes wide as quarters. Pete held the door for the two intoxicated men, and Henry ducked and entered while Leo scraped together an excuse for not making much sense.

  “Sorry. Working too hard,” he said. “Haven’t slept much the past few days.”

  “Nothing to apologize for, Mr. Sheffield.”

  “You’re a good man, Pete.”

  * * *

  Roughly an hour later, just after midnight, they finally turned off Gin Lane and passed through the electronic gate. As the car crept up the driveway Henry zipped down his side window, marveling at the lawn sculptures. “I’ve never seen anything quite like those,” he said, pointing at the giant bronze chess pieces. “So where’s the pool, out past the house?”

  Leo answered yes, but added that it might be a little chilly until he got the heater cranking for a while. “Give it about a half hour to heat up and it’ll be perfect,” he said, leaning closer to Henry beside the open window. “In the meantime, I have some ideas for how to keep you entertained.”

  Upon exiting the car, Leo handed his driver half the bills from his money clip, clapped him on the shoulder and double-checked the time when he would be returning in the morning to pick up Henry. “My employees are expected to arrive at roughly eight thirty,” he said.

  “Not to worry, sir,” Pete said, looking down at the almost comically huge tip in his hand, and nodded to Leo as he pocketed the wad of bills. “I’ll be here at seven thirty, eight at the latest.”

  “Good man, Pete.”

  Leo stood on the first square of the slate path on the edge of the lawn and watched the limousine slowly snake its way back to the gates, before leading Henry to the kitchen door and fumbling with his keys. When he found the right one and turned it inside the lock, he paused, confused by the lack of resistance. The alarm panel didn’t beep as he pushed the door open, the light beside the keypad a steady green. Gina must have been the last one there, since no one else had any reason to be. Okay, no need for Sheila to know. She would flip if she knew the alarm hadn’t been set and the house had been unlocked with nobody home, but people made mistakes. Gina had worked for them and done her job well for so many years now, she deserved a pass.

  The two men entered the kitchen and Leo opened the refrigerator, quickly unsheathing a bottle of Dom Pérignon from the chiller, where a sea of identical bottles stood in tight rows. After handing Henry the champagne, he opened a glass-fronted cabinet and pulled out two long-stemmed flutes. They carried the bottle and glasses upstairs to the second floor, and as soon as they entered the master bedroom, Leo pressed a button on a wall-mounted panel. “The thermostat for the pool heater,” he said before repeating what he’d said in the car. “Give it about half an hour and it’ll be perfect.”

  The two silver handles turned in his hands and he pushed open the balcony’s French doors, letting the night air breeze in. He and Henry stood on opposite sides of the bed for a moment, the thin white drapes waving and rippling dreamily between them. It occurred to Leo that they shouldn’t use this bedroom. Sheila would be sleeping here tomorrow, and Gina wouldn’t think to replace the linens beforehand since no one was supposed to be out until morning. No tragedy, though; they had seven other bedrooms.

  “Come out here,” he said, already stepping onto the balcony. His breathing felt labored, his heartbeat a bit too fast. With Henry beside him and cricket noises as a calm background, he spoke softer. “Magnificent night, isn’t it? I wish you could stay the whole weekend.”

  “I’m just glad I’m here with you now.” Henry touched Leo’s cheek, and they kissed, which could have been the most perfect moment if Leo’s mind hadn’t begun to race, the worry ramping up even before he opened his eyes. Henry had those bandages on his arms beneath his jacket sleeves and had looked so incredibly sad when he slid into the limo. And now they were alone. And Sheila would arrive tomorrow afternoon. And Henry was holding him so tightly, as though he’d begun worrying as well, but for a different reason, clutching him like a life raft.

  The kiss had lasted only a few seconds, yet for Leo everything had taken on an odd aura. As he watched Henry unwrap the foil and unwind the wire from the champagne bottle, he wondered if he’d made a big mistake bringing him out here. Leo’s thoughts registered as screams while Henry filled their glasses to the point of overflowing, and they spent the next minute sipping in silence, looking out at the lake and the trough of bluish light cradled on its surface.

  “I want you to forget about everything for tonight,” Leo said, hoping to supplant his own negative thoughts with words Henry would like to hear. “Forget that I’m married, and that this has to be a secret, and that we won’t get to spend much time till September. We’re together now.”

  Henry stared for quite a while before he leaned in and kissed him again, then eased away and rested his head on Leo’s shoulder. “What I’d really like,” he said, “is to imagine that, for tonight, we’re the only two people on earth.”

  “Alright, that sounds—” Leo’s thought cut short. He lowered his glass and turned toward the bedroom. “Did you just hear something?”

  Henry kept his head pressed to Leo’s suit jacket. “I don’t think so. What did it sound like?”

  “A creak? A scrape? I don’t know exactly.”

  “After all that coke you might be a little paranoid, you know.”

  “You’re probably right,” Leo said, still focused on the doorway across the room. “Speaking of which, there’s plenty more. Are you game if I set us up with a few more lines?”

  “I’ll do a couple more if you’re going to, but I have to warn you, with all the meds in my system—Wait, I think I just heard something, too.”

  Leo leaned down to the pocket mirror and cut more coke with the razor blade, thinking for the first time since meeting up with him that handing a razor to Henry had been in
credibly dumb, callous even. Trying to shrug off the thought, he set the mirror aside and stepped toward the bedroom doorway, calling out, “Hello? Is anybody there?” though he realized the pointlessness of such a question even before he’d finished speaking. But someone could be there. The alarm had been disarmed and the door unlocked, so someone else might have come out early for the holiday weekend. A relative would answer; a burglar wouldn’t. The silence set his imagination in motion—men with knives, men with guns, ransom demands. He squatted down and stuck his head into the hall, but after seeing nothing out of the ordinary he inhaled deeply, stood once again and slunk back into the room. Only then did it occur to him that he didn’t have a weapon, so what could he realistically hope to do if he did come across some crackhead thief with a knife or a gun? I could get my pistol from the wall safe, he thought. Should I? No, I’m too high and too drunk to be handling a gun. And what was it that Henry said about being on lots of meds?

  “It’s an old house,” Leo said, feeling thoroughly frazzled as he dumped a larger pile of powder onto the mirror and chopped at it and raked a series of fat cables along the surface. “It’s the wood settling, that’s all, the crossbeams and such. Like you said before, we’re the only two people on earth. And also like you said, I’m just being paranoid.”

  Henry wrapped his arms around Leo’s midsection and hugged him from behind. “You might be happier in this life here, if not for me.”

  “You make me happy.” The truth of Leo’s words mired him for a moment in the paradoxical state he’d felt during other secret moments with Henry, a simultaneous flood of gratitude, worry and frustration. Though he wasn’t in love with him, Henry had brought Leo some much needed light into his life. They each proceeded to snort the monstrous lines and chase them with glass after glass of champagne. Soon the bottle was nearly empty, and by then Leo’s head seemed to have filled with helium. His veins and inner ear buzzed. He’d begun levitating.

  Henry peered over the balcony railing. “I’m going in now,” he said.

  “What about your bandages? You’re not supposed to get those wet, right?”

  “Fuck it.” Henry snatched up the bag of coke, already racing out of the room as he called back, “See you in the pool!”

  Leo stayed on the balcony for a couple more minutes, slugging the last of the champagne. When Henry entered his view down below, he leaned over the railing, smiled and waved, but Henry hadn’t looked his way before an acute pain entered Leo’s chest. Henry didn’t see Leo drop the empty champagne bottle, either, and had no way of knowing that he was staggering into the bedroom, shouldering his way past the dresser and flopping backward onto the bed, his heart hammering away like pistons in a Lamborghini going a hundred miles an hour.

  Plenty of the men in Leo’s circle had broken their coronary cherries years ago, but he hadn’t yet. Goddamn it, he pleaded with the ceiling, please don’t let this be a fucking heart attack...not now... The bedspread may as well have been the surface of a gurney while he breathed through the pain, groping for equilibrium. He needed this sharp pressure to pass and some semblance of balance to return. Those last few lines may have been a few too many. Who was he kidding? Of course it’d been too much. Men his age couldn’t do more than a dozen lines of coke, down a bottle of Scotch and chase it all with champagne in the span of an hour or two, and expect to survive. His nostrils burned all the way to the base of his brain. Too hot on the bed. Too many layers of clothes.

  This isn’t a heart attack, he thought. Just calm the hell down.

  He blinked and gasped, staring at the ceiling until the constriction began loosening, the crown molding in the corner slowing its spin, and slowing more...slowing down...until finally it stopped swirling altogether. He wanted to join Henry and swim with him under the moonlight; he wanted to make the most of the night. Not knowing if this would be their last chance to swim together, or possibly even their final private night, he would make it downstairs and join Henry in the water. He would. But first Leo needed a minute alone, to breathe.

  THREE

  Earlier that afternoon, Corey’s mother, Gina, sat swathed in her old pink bathrobe, rocking in her grandmother’s creaky hand-me-down rocking chair, peering out through a slit at the edge of her drapes. She’d positioned herself beside the slim opening between the fabric and the window frame so she could remain hidden and still have a view of the driveway and the walkway leading to her front door. If Ray actually followed through with his promise to pick up more of his boxes, she’d want to see him coming.

  For hours now, she’d been listening to a classic rock station and dulling her anxiety with Klonopin and cheap red wine, popping another pill when a good Zeppelin song came on, another when Freddie Mercury and Bowie sang together, washing down two or maybe three more in one go when the DJ announced Pink Floyd would start off the next set. Somewhere along the way she’d lost track of how many pills she’d swallowed and how many times she’d refilled her glass, but it must have been plenty since closing one eye helped her see much better and the gallon jug had been full at noon but now was at least a third of the way gone. This would be the last Thursday she’d have off from work before the Sheffields arrived tomorrow and the first long weekend of the season started, the last day she’d have to herself for the next hundred days.

  Another full set of songs blurred past without her paying much attention, but then “Honky Tonk Woman” penetrated her pill haze and she smiled while muttering along with the refrain. The song ended sooner than it was supposed to, though, and Gina cringed as a loud commercial for a fish market cut in—a man and his wife yelled excitedly about their rock-bottom prices, jabbering like meth-heads about clams and flounder and fluke. Jesus, she thought, no sane person should ever get so excited about crab cakes.

  She stood from the rocker, barefoot and off-balance, steadying herself with her free hand on the arm of the couch, all the while thinking she might have to smash the stereo. Sure, Ray would yell when he saw it, probably follow suit and break something himself, but screw him, it was her stereo after all, even if he considered it his. She’d told him to get out months ago, but now it really was time for him to pick up the rest of his stuff. Time for him to finally stop using these “appointments” to take some, but not all, of his clothes and boxes. No more excuses to see her. Time for him to finally leave her the hell alone. He’d dragged his ass and mooched off her for too long. Three years together, and only the first year or so with any moments worthy of a photo album, with the past two years amounting to nothing more than a volatile trudge toward separation. Factor in the infidelities, the drunken arguments, the money he stole, the night two months back when she told him to get out and stay out—after he’d hit her again... Another glass of wine or two and she might just haul the rest of his shit to the curb and post a FREE sign on the pile.

  More wine gurgled into her glass as a car insurance commercial fizzled off and bled into an obnoxious ad for a pizza parlor. Gina pushed herself from the couch arm, wobbling for a moment. She couldn’t listen to one more goddamned commercial.

  The terry cloth robe felt softer against her skin than it had an hour ago, and her vision had a syrupy quality, as though she were looking at the living room furniture through a mason jar when she baby-stepped over to the coat rack by the door and grabbed her sons’ old baseball bat. Swinging it with one hand while sipping wine, she felt the urge to assault the stereo growing, if only to kill the commercial block. But then the liquid running along her fingers and dripping on her toe caused her to gaze down. She laughed at the dark splash on the floor, until she thought of how the wine pooling and stretching along the wood grain of the scuffed old boards looked like blood.

  Her glass was almost empty but she managed to spill some more the second she recognized the opening measure of “Free Fallin’,” its simple chord progression, clean and uncluttered—and here came the first line—Tom Petty’s charcoal voice singing about a good girl. Gina sw
ayed along with the music with her eyelids closed, but they fluttered open almost immediately in reaction to the glass slipping from her hand—and then the slow-motion fall, her awkward attempt to catch it, then the explosive sound from the glass smashing against the hardwood. She staggered back, the walls now set on a spin cycle, flinching with her entire body as the bat also slammed down and clattered. She closed one eye and watched it roll over the wine and slowly come to rest.

  The knock on the door entered her chest like thunder, pitching her even farther off-kilter and sending her lunging for the couch arm, but not in time to keep from stepping on broken glass. Cursing under her breath, she clutched her wounded foot and plucked a long sliver of glass from her big toe and two smaller shards from her arch. A series of fierce knuckle raps rattled the door and she squinted in that direction, mumbling, “Hold your goddamned horses, I’m coming.” Her first step hurt like hell but she managed to hobble away from the puddle and glass, her footprints splotching behind her a dark blend of blood and wine.

  More annoyed than anything, she cracked the door open. Ray nudged it wider and greeted her in his usual smooth-talking way. “Hey, sexy. Happy to see me?”

  “Took you long enough,” she said, yanking him in by the arm, already disappointed to see a gold chain and crucifix displayed outside his tight red T-shirt. She closed the door and watched him rub his jawline, her face flushing with heat when she saw him looking at the broken glass and finger lakes of cabernet.

  He rolled the bat with his shoe. “Whoa,” he said with a grin. “You have a little accident, Gina, or what?”

  Watching him take off his Yankees cap and smooth down his hair a few times, Gina couldn’t for the life of her recall why she’d wanted him here. He owed her thousands of dollars. His contracting business had been in the toilet even before the cops picked him up for his second DUI. He had hurt her. And worse, he’d threatened her sons. He’d belittled them, hovering a hair away from fistfights with Corey for a year or more. And now he had a lawyer to pay and a pile of fines. He’d always had a blinding compulsion with sports betting and scratch-offs, and the increasing debt provided an excuse to gamble even more. In his mind, he needed one big win to fix it all, but in the meantime he’d had to supplement Gina’s “loans” by selling pills to regulars at the bar, or else fall short of the fees for his case and pay for it in an entirely different way—thirty days in jail.